Using the Command Line

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Linux

This documentation is written from the point of view of Linux. Using Mapcraft on other operating systems may mean slight differences in the way things are invoked, but the overall behaviour of command switches should be the same.

Version

This documentation is for version 0.3 of Mapcraft.

Java Options

By default, the mapcraft script invokes Java with the -Xmx1024m, which tells Java to use up to 1GB of memory for its heap. If you don't have 1GB available, that's okay, because Java will only actually use the lesser of what it actually needs and what it can get.

Without this switch, Java is limited to using only a few tens of MB, which sometimes isn't enough for large maps. For really large maps, this memory can be increased by changing the option in the script, assuming you have the memory available.

Mapcraft is normally invoked from the command line. There is a script called mapcraft (or, on Microsoft platforms, mapcraft.bat) which can be used to start the software. With no command line options given, the main GUI window will open, and the user can create a new map, or load an existing one, from the menu.

See the GUI documentation for details on how to use the GUI environment.

Standard Operations

The standard operations are to load an existing map, or to create a new map. General usage information can be obtained by doing the following.

mapcraft -help

Load a map

mapcraft -load <filename>

To test this, from the installation directory, you can try:

mapcraft -load maps/island.map

Create a map

mapcraft -create <name> -width <width> -height <height> -scale <scale> -terrain <filename> [-square ] [-local ]